We sailed north in uneasy peace, leaving the tall shoulders of Mont Pelée behind and skirting island after island. Some were names I knew, with French soil and citizens like our own. Some were little more than sandy cays, or lush greenery atop inaccessible cliffs, that our captain chose to circle, as if in search of some stranded mariner, before sailing on. I did not openly question our course, at least in public. If they thought me too much the pampered lady to understand that we were not sailing by the direct route, I would not disillusion them just yet. But I did begin to wonder if we were even searching for a rendezvous, or rather seeking to shake off some unknown pursuit...

Count Danik was fretting. We had been travelling so slowly that, if all had been well, it was already past time to send back the messenger bird. But both of us were almost sure that all was not well — yet, what use would it be if the Avalanche were to follow and overhaul us before we could discover the trap, wherever it might be? And worse, what if after all, Osman could not find us, as we crept round inlet after inlet, far from the main trading routes?

We sent off the message, at last. "Wait three days" — and then Danik's best estimate of our speed and position. If it reached St-Pierre in time, Osman would wait three more days before setting out to hunt down our ship, wherever she might be. Or it might be that the bird was too late and that the Avalanche had set sail already. Either way, the decision was made. Help was coming. Something here was definitely wrong.

And yet when trouble did arrive, it was not from the quarter we had expected. Nor was it the betrayal we had foreseen. It was Danik, in fact, who began it. It was he who urged the captain to let us land.

"There, madame — at the cliff's foot —"

It was a hot afternoon, and the ship was creeping along the coast as ever with barely a breath of wind in her sails. As idle passengers, we had begged the use of the captain's spyglass. As owner of the cargo and part-charterer of the ship herself, my whims were not refused — though the captain had seemed very reluctant. Perhaps he was wise.

Between us, we were scanning the deserted beaches narrowly as we passed. We were still a long way from our destination and well off established routes. This was old buccaneer territory — we'd already glimpsed the crumbling shoulders of a Spanish fort on the coast up ahead — and boasted a multitude of hidden coves to which ships might have been brought, willingly, or by force, to discharge a certain portion of their cargo...

Danik was taking his turn with the glass. He'd stiffened, training the lenses more closely on the rippled sand. It looked as if our gamble had paid off. Boats had landed here — and recently. There might have been an innocent explanation, but a far more likely one was the presence under the cliff of what bore a strong resemblance to the dark mouth of a cave.... Whatever was planned for our own cargo — the Count and I exchanged glances as he passed the spy-glass back into my possession — we were of one mind. This whole coast was suspicious; and it seemed we might have found the destination of at least some of what I had lost.

I took a closer look, while my companion argued the reluctant captain into lowering a boat to drop the two of us ashore. There was no doubt about it. There were the marks of more than one keel hauled up on the beach, and the churning of many footprints in the sand. Something had been landed here; or loaded.

Oh, we thought we were very clever, Danilo and I! We thought we had understood everything that was going on — a little petty theft, dishonesty among the chartered captains — and had nipped the problem in the bud, as my father used to say. We did not dream that in coming here myself, I had played entirely into my adversary's desire; still less, then, did we even suspect whom that adversary would claim to be...

I will pass lightly over our investigations on shore, for while we had guessed aright, it proved to be of no moment. Something had been landed, and had been dragged to the cave; but it was not there now, and it was not hard to see why. The floor of the cave was awash with smooth sand in which our own footmarks left dampened hollows. The base of this opening lay lower than the other side of the beach, and at high tide it would be flooded to a depth of almost a metre. Nothing could be stored here for long.

Gunshots robbed us of any time for disappointment we might have felt — gunshots, and the sound of oars. The boat that had brought us had fled the beach, and was hastening back across the bay, her oarsmen splashing in their panic.

For a moment, I knew only that we had been deserted. It was Count Danik's arm that held me back in the shadows of the cave-mouth, when, furious, I would have rushed out; and from those shadows, then, that we saw it all.

The long, low ship, a predator in every line, even as our own lumbering merchantman was a lamb to the slaughter. The pitiful engagement, between two foes so ill-matched in force. The moments, afterward, when we waited for the captors to send armed men on our own behalf. And the strange silence that lay over the bay as victor and victim set sail in convoy, the strange ship nipping at her conquest's heels, and we were left alone and unsuspected on the island coast.

Carelessness — or chivalry? I still do not know. If the captain was questioned, then I can only guess that he must have shielded my presence. I would not have credited him with so much loyalty. Danger does not always come from those we mistrust.

But even if we had escaped capture, our situation, as must be evident, was far from pleasant. We had landed at the low of the tide. Already it had begun to rise, and would ere long have reduced the golden bay to a narrow strip of sand. Intending only a few minutes' stay, we had brought neither meat nor drink, nor any cloak or jacket. We would not, to be sure, drown; but by the time, sooner or later, that our presence here was disclosed, we might well be reduced to a sufficiently miserable condition to welcome captivity with open arms.

"I've no mind to be stranded on a beach." Danik was forthright.

He looked up at the cliff-edge above us, topped with vibrant greenery. "Madame... do you think that with my aid you might venture...?"

I, too, had felt the lure of the moist verdure promised above. Already, prompted by the knowledge that it could not be quenched, the first sly torments of thirst had begun to tickle my throat. In a few hours they would be real.

But I could not help but laugh at Danik's careful consideration for my frailities. "You do not know me very well, monsieur le comte, if you think I would not venture such a climb unaided. Did we but have the time, I would tell you a hundred tales of my childhood upon the mountainsides and gorges of my home—"

I broke off at his expression of absolute horror. Anyone would think that he had never seen a lady taking off her skirts before.

"Come now, monsieur —" I confess I had thought better of him — "surely you do not expect me to address myself to a cliff-face in this condition?" A gesture indicated the petticoats that were pooling around my feet as I stepped clear.

Then it was my turn to avert my eyes instinctively with burning cheeks. He had begun hastily to remove his own nether garments.

Only in order, it transpired, to offer them chivalrously to me. It seemed the prospect of a lady engaging upon a climb in her under-drawers was unthinkable while her companion could volunteer to do so in her place. To be frank, if it were not that I am somewhat slender, I do not think that in any case I could have fitted into his breeches, as it were — and it did not seem to me after my struggle that the ensuing arrangement provided any great improvement in decency.... However, having no wish to rip my linen in the scramble, I thanked him prettily and took care to begin my ascent with great independence at some distance from his own.

Alas for false pride! I do not consider that I have become over-soft of recent years; but it is true that the life of a merchant is not so active as that which I was accustomed to lead in my girlhood. I will not say that I was reduced so far as to appeal for help — but I will own that my own ascent was a lumpen thing compared to the active grace displayed by the Count, and that there were times when I would have seized upon an offered hand with gratitude. Such a grasp being out of reach, however, pride compelled me to make what shifts I could to complete the climb without disgrace, and even to suppress the ardours of my breathing as best I could when I had reached the top.

If I had looked for compliment, I received none. Danik, it seemed, had taken me at my word and accepted the same competence in me he would have expected in any member of his own crew. I did not know whether to be affronted or flattered. I settled upon simply envying his physique.

And now, with Danilo and myself upon the verge of striking forth into our unknown island's interior, I find I must halt my tale awhile to intimate certain facts, with which we did not until later become acquainted but without which these events would doubtless appear to the world as arbitrary and nonsensical as at that time they seemed to us.

The identity and plans, then of our aggressor — or, at least, that identity by which I perforce knew him, for of his true birth I never learned. Edmond, then. Edmond de la Tour... brother to my Emile, the elder by some twenty minutes, and sometime companion of my early childhood at Mireille. Dead these fifteen years past, as well I could recall, having been the only comforter young Emile would permit to witness his tears. I gave him all the childish comfort I could, in the same spirit and accepted in the same way, I believe, as the mournful caresses of Belle, his white hound. A proud youth does not easily permit others to see him cry.

Edmond had drowned in the bay, in rough weather, when his skiff overturned. The house-boy who was with him said he had seen him struck on the head as the two of them had been flung into the water; he had tried to catch onto Edmond's hand, but the waves had separated them. No-one saw young de la Tour slip under. No-one ever saw him again alive.

Our western shores, in Martinique, are not gentle like those of the Caribbean coast. The ocean breaks upon them with the full force of wind and wave, and those who die there are seldom found.

Edmond had been eight years drowned when Emile and I were wed, and their father dead of a fever and two years in his grave, and if Emile still dreamed at times of his twin, only I and the walls of our chamber knew it. But someone must have kept the elder brother in mind. Someone who had watched with envy the growing prosperity of the House of La Tour. Someone who learned of Emile's death, and knew that a living brother could claim half of what I now held in Jehan's name... and knew that my word of acceptance would carry more weight among those in St-Pierre than any paper claim. If I did not contest this Edmond's return, then few outside the family would take it upon themselves to give me the lie.

And, to do him justice, he had troubled to learn enough of me to judge that I would not be easily brow-beaten or cozened on my own ground. At some point, he had resolved to take steps to attract my personal attention towards a location more to his advantage — and had profited by it meanwhile to derive some advance payments upon the estate he coveted. When I took ship myself to investigate the losses, I had been dancing like a puppet to his tune. It was not my goods upon which he counted to lay hands — it was my person, and I had delivered that precious commodity within his grasp.

Had I been on that ship when apprehended, my destination would have been that same ancient fort we had so lately espied. And, alone and without prospect of release, my resolve might indeed have crumbled, to cede a half of my son's inheritance to this man with smiling promises and lawyers' threats....

But chance — in the shape of Danilo — intervened. I was not alone, and I was not captive. And I was not, as my enemy supposed, without resort. I had no need to recourse to his aid to leave this place where he had trapped me. I had only to attend the coming of allies of whom he knew nothing; of loyal Osman, and the Avalanche.

You must not suppose, of course, that I was acquainted with all this at the time of which I write. Some I learned later, from his own lips. Some, I confess, I have guessed at even as I set it down. But some we were to discover soon enough, and before long; before the sun of the next morning had cleared the trees. We were not castaways alone, but also fugitives.

On our domestic arrangements during this period, I will not dwell over-much, save to say that chivalry soon gave place to the comradeship of necessity, at least for warmth; and that I had never thought to miss my petticoats so much. We must have mourned the loss of that quantity of cloth above a dozen times in the course of those days — to make a shelter, to strain water, to carry burdens, bind scratches, and to dry ourselves at need.

Such clothing as we had could be ill-spared. Danik, in his linen, suffered the most. I offered him back his breeches, but he flushed and would not hear of it. In his place I fear I would not have taken such a gift either — and not for such noble motives. We were neither of us, by then, too savoury in our persons. Strange, how one's own dirt is so much less offensive to the nose than that of others.

Our life in those days was a game of hide-and-seek, played out across a ground the size of a small plantation, with parties of determined opponents far better equipped than we; and if you find it hard to conceive how two ragged fugitives could with ease outwit all those who sought to find them, then I must suppose that you have never trod the soil of Caribbean islands untended by human hand for fifty years or more.

The rocks were shattered and seamed by a thousand gorges, as if thrown up by some titanic convulsion vast æons before, affording a plenitude of hiding-places for the moment's need. But above all, they were thickly clad in such verdant greenery as is nowhere else to be found in the world, unless it is in deepest Africa's heart. This growth took its toll, as I have said, upon our clothing — one would not long have credited Danik's shirt for white, or for anything better-tailored than a dishcloth — but in its cover we could have lain still and watched our hunters pass within a stone's-throw without revealing a hint of our presence. On more than one occasion we in fact did so....

But the feat of which I admit I am most proud was that daring raid, driven by hunger, conceived and executed almost entirely by myself against the camp of a pursuing party when they had retired for the night. I had intended, indeed, to undertake it alone. But Danik, discovering by chance the course of my endeavour, chose rather to join than to dissuade me. By that, you may judge either of the depths of our hunger or the heights to which our mutual respect had attained — or perchance of both.

The plan and the execution, however, were mine, with my companion taking the part of lookout and of beast of burden as we fled, with our victims aroused and in an uproar behind us. I had secured food, a machete, hot coals — and if you judge that the chance of betraying ourselves by smoke did not warrant the risk, then I hold it clear you have never endured for days with never a cooked meal — and a certain garment besides on Danik's behalf, the nature of which I believe I need not name.... For all his relief, I do not know if he has yet quite forgiven me!

But all good jests must come to an end, and our friend Edmond was the first to tire of this merry pursuit. Why hunt the eagle on the wing, when the unfledged chick cannot leave the nest? He had a ship now at his disposal, known in St-Pierre and trusted. What persuasion he used I do not know — perhaps the same that first brought her course so aptly past his fastness, perhaps some threat or promise more direct.

He sent our merchantman home as directly as might be, with a leavening of his own men amongst the crew, and a false message from L'Aiglonne to bring her son aboard on a voyage to join her. He dared to lay his hands upon Jehan, alone with his tutor and the servants ,with none there who would even question an order from L'Aiglonne, when the ship sent to bear it was the same that had taken their mistress on her supposed pleasure-voyage..... He had dared — dared, in this game of wits we were playing — dared to strike at the one who had no part or blame in it. He had laid his hands upon my son, and set a dagger to his throat to threaten my own. And then, with the ship safely in sight, and its precious cargo assured, he let it be known what he had done.

Danilo tells me that I swore the most original and bloody oaths he has heard from any woman outside the pages of Euripides, and has quoted me the Greek to prove it. Since my childhood did not, as his, include a classical education, I will take him at his word for the blood-thirstiness of the daughters of Ancient Greece; but if their passion for vengeance was one-half of mine at that moment, then I will credit them with the authorship of the most horrid threats you may care to name, without a pause for doubt. And with the resolution to enact them upon the instant.

But nothing was to be done; for it was all too plain that while my own life was of far more value to this Edmond than my death, the slender life of my son was no more than an obstacle between this man and the other half of a fortune. His future, in this place, was measured precisely in the balance between the gain to be made by retaining my good-will, and the gain to be made by taking the risk of claiming all..... I believe I should have given way entirely, had it not been on that same day, in that same hour, that the Avalanche was finally sighted.

The child's safety was paramount. On that, there could be no disagreement. And the only safety for Jehan was to be found away from there, on board that fortunate ship, among men loyal to Danik of Ruritania, and to the wishes of L'Aiglonne. On that, too, Danik was only to ready to agree.

But a child is not a treasure-chest or a great diamond, to be fought over and clawed back dyed with blood. His life is as fragile as a candle-flame that cannot be snatched, lest it fall or be struck, and hence go out. And Jehan was ringed around with steel. Osman could not bring the Avalanche in to wrest him by force, even if the guns of the fort did not defend its anchorage against all attack.

Only one thing could ensure any chance of his survival; and Danik would not even consider it as a possibility. The only chance for Jehan's escape, as was all too plain to see, was for his value as a hostage to be negated. For all attention to be drawn to the successful conclusion of a long chase. For L'Aiglonne to permit herself to be captured.

If the sacrifice had been his I do not doubt Danik would have gone to it gladly, with a smile on his lips and daredevil mockery in his heart; but even he must needs admit that such a course of action would be senseless for us all. His sacrifice would be of no value — his life, in Edmond's hands, of no account. It was I who was the prize in this game of ours, too valuable to he harmed... and my freedom alone that could buy enough distraction for a rescuer to reach my son. And to that role, as we both knew, he was far better suited than I. No woman could hope to pass unnoticed down by that ship — not even one clad, or ill-clad, as I was. No woman could slip unhindered among her crew. And no-one, man or woman alike, could bid the Avalanche sail without her master's word, if that master faced captivity and death in my place...

"Go, mon cher. We have little time. Take my son to safety — and I will await your return in the fullest of confidence."

We were watching the ship creep into anchorage below, shadowed by the crumbling bulk of the fort on the other point. I smiled at him. "Grant me this once the chance to play the noble part, I beg...."

One eyebrow flew upwards at that as he grinned, somewhat ruefully. "Eh bien, camarade — play it well. And may God go with us both."

He pressed my hand briefly and was gone, with that silent grace that was all his own. I lingered a moment longer, gazing down at that ship below; then parted in my turn. I had a long way to go, if I was to draw off pursuit, and little time.